Join writer Molly Peacock with curators Kathleen Foster (Philadelphia Museum of Art) and Georgiana Uhlyarik (Art Gallery of Ontario) for a conversation about  Mary Hiester Reid, a painter active in the 1880s who produced over three hundred stunning, emotive floral still lifes and landscapes. Born in the US in 1854, trained by Thomas Eakins at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Mary  Hiester Reid balanced creativity and domesticity while she fought for her place as a professional artist. She is the subject of Molly Peacock’s latest book Flower Diary: in which Mary Hiester Reid paints, travels, marries & opens a door. 

Copies of Flower Diary: in which Mary Hiester Reid paints, travels, marries & opens a door  are available for sale at shopAGO.

Biographer and distinguished poet Molly Peacock is the author of The Paper Garden: Mrs. Delany Begins Her Life’s Work at 72, as well as seven volumes of poetry, including The Analyst: Poems. She is an arts activist and, with a friend, started what became a cultural institution in New York City: Poetry in Motion on the subways and buses. A former Leon Levy Center for Biography Fellow and a dual American/Canadian citizen, Molly divides her time between Toronto and New York City.

Kathleen A. Foster is The Robert L. McNeil, Jr., Senior Curator of American Art and Director of the Center for American Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. With degrees from Wellesley College (B.A.) and Yale University (M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D.), she has held curatorial posts at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Indiana University Art Museum, and taught at Williams College, Temple University, Indiana University, and the University of Pennsylvania, where she currently serves as an adjunct professor in the History of Art. She has published work on topics in American art from the late-eighteenth century to the present, with a particular emphasis on the work of Thomas Eakins, including the prize-winning Thomas Eakins Rediscovered (1997), two essays in the catalogue for the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Thomas Eakins (2001), the reconstruction of Eakins’s own drawing manual (2005), and the recent An Eakins Masterpiece Restored: Seeing The Gross Clinic Anew (2012).

Georgiana Uhlyarik is Fredrik S. Eaton Curator, Canadian Art, and co-lead of the Indigenous + Canadian Art Department at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. She co-curated: Tunirrusiangit: Kenojuak Ashevak and Tim Pitsiulak, the J.S. McLean Centre for Indigenous + Canadian Art, Introducing Suzy Lake, and collaborations with Tate Modern, Jewish Museum, NY, Terra Foundation for American Art and Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo. She is currently an adjunct faculty member at York University and University of Toronto, and research associate, Modern Literature & Culture, Ryerson University. Originally from Romania, she lives in Toronto with her twin sons.